Ethnography
For my ethnography project, I decided to focus on the audience of the HBO series The Sopranos. My husband has rented the entire series from Neflix over the course of this winter (and I have watched many episodes with him) and he is loyally dedicated to the show and watching each episode carefully. Our home does not have cable, so neither of us had been interested in seeing the series until, in June of last year, the series had its finale and was splashed all over the news because of it. I know the series also received critical and popular acclaim, so it seemed a fitting place to start for an ethnography study. I wanted to find a source outside of the show itself and not affiliated with HBO, so I searched high and low for web forums on this series but was sorely disappointed. I found a few web discussion tools, but most of them had very small audiences, limited content, or very outdated postings. I decided to look at the HBO webpage to see if there was anything on the site and I was pleased to find an extensive Community page for the series—516 topics, hundreds of thousands of discussion posts, and over 1.5 million views (it is not delineated by number of viewers, but rather by the number of times the content has been viewed). (There are two ways to link to the forum: HBO Website for Sopranos or through HBO Community. The links are at the bottom of this post.)
On the Community page, there are a number of different bulletin boards on which users can post content. The page is currently set to discussion threads for a number of different episodes. There are also discussion threads for music, characters, favorite lines, and The Bing, a strip club owned and operated by one of the mob members and which also houses a mob office. It is also possible to subscribe to a Sopranos newsletter on this page. Discussion topics are divided into a few different categories, including HBO official threads, music for seasons 1-5, archives, member-created threads, and member-created archives. Some of the content is viewable and searchable by non-members, but it is not possible to post a comment without membership.
Specific practices on the site:
Most discussion threads were started with specific questions posed by a user. In one section, questions were posed by HBO staff people and in other sections, users posted their own questions. One question from an HBO staff was “Who is your favorite character?� but it lacked the usual follow-up question “Why?�. User practices commonly involved short responses to the direct questions. There was some interaction between users, possibly posing a short question in a response to a main discussion thread that would later be answered by another member. Generally, users answered the main questions or commented on the main topics rather than interacting with one another. In addition, HBO has rules for use of the site and reserves the right to revoke membership or delete content if the standards are not followed.
Social agendas and respondents’ stances:
In examining responses by the forum users, it seems the overarching agenda is to have a place to discuss various tenets of the show. There is an interesting added dimension to the discussions because some of the threads were started before the show went off the air and users are still adding comments now, nine months after the finale. Unlike our class online chats, wherein group members discuss topics to better inform our teaching practices or to work through an issue or an idea, the discussions on the community page are less interactive, less oriented at working out an idea and more about individual users just sharing their own thoughts. There does not seem to be much discussion between users in order to arrive at a decision or conclusion. This impression is reinforced by the brevity of users’ responses. Many comments are short—just a few sentences in length—and do not seem to build on the responses of others, nor interact with the responses of others. This is different from my own experiences with our class discussion board, where students post their thoughts and others post direct comments. In fact, the responses on the message board seem more reflective of a live, online chat room than an asynchronous discussion forum, because the responses are short, informal, lacking punctuation, full of IM abbreviations, and somewhat superficial in the sense that short responses don’t provide room to explore an issue in-depth or to fully develop a thought into a paragraph.
In general, the social agenda seems to be that respondents gather in this online community to share their own thoughts and read the thoughts of others. It does not appear that site users are coming to the discussion forum seeking answers or clarification about what has occurred in episodes of The Sopranos, but rather are seeking out a common place to share their experiences and affinity for the show. In a few instances, members have posted longer comments or thoughts about the events of an episode or about the specific mores of a character, but usually there have not been responses to these longer posts and so the discussion board lacks a feeling of dialogue among users. Further, it does not seem that forum members are seeking socialization in the way that users of FaceBook or MySpace or even online chat rooms seek interaction. The use of The Sopranos discussion forum seems pretty straightforward as a place for viewers of the show to simply put their ideas, albeit briefly, to writing.
I noted one particular posting that was more in-depth and emotional than nearly everything else I found on the forum. User raymcd19 writes:
Has anyone seen the latest David Chase interview? It was in the papers two days ago. He basically calls all of us losers. Talks about the war in Iraq and how Sopranos fans are pathetic for buzzing about his bullshit ending when there were more important things going on in the world. As for me, this interview provided some real insight into the mind of this idiot. Must be nice to have enough money to rip your fan base after a series ends. I think I figured out why he sometimes took years to come up with a new season. He is an intellectual snob who enjoys sh****g on his audience.(ie-final episode) "We didn't expect them to be that **** for that long. It's one thing to be deeply involved with a television show. It's another to be so involved that all you do is sit on a couch and watch it. It seemed that those people were just looking for an excuse to be **** off. There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings." This guy goes and comes up with a final scene that would be laughed out of a film school. I had to TIVO the episode because I thought that my DirectTV crapped out and I missed the actual ending. Intellectual snobbery, disdain for your audience...it's all clear to me after reading his comments. I'm not sitting on my couch watching his show all day. I haven't even posted until now. It gives me comfort to know that we will probably not be hearing from this jerkoff again unless there is a movie. He's no David Milch and his track record of taking YEARS to come up with a new season is hopefully proof that he is creatively bankrupt. Good riddance.
My methods of analysis were pretty informal for this project. It required a lot of time browsing the forum to get familiar with the format, the layout, the threads, and the user content. I started my analysis of content simply by browsing content of various threads, observing the length of the post, observing if the posts were in response to other users, and by browsing posts on the same thread that were at the beginning, middle, and end. Then I started to read more closely for content to study how closely users were sticking to initial questions for a thread, to examine the interaction between users, and to watch for any emerging themes, agendas, or disagreements.
This was an interesting exercise for me, particularly in what I gathered about the limitations and abilities of this media construct. Users of The Sopranos forum seemed to be using it more informally, as in a chat room, than as a place to post ideas and respond to others. Users may be limited in their ability to interact with one another both because of the way members have used the forum—more of a question/answer format than interactive—and because of the asynchronous nature of the medium. Unlike live, synchronous chat, this medium provides an area for users to compose longer, more in-depth posts and responses, though most users did not take advantage of this opportunity. The high volume of threads and posts presents a challenge to users and viewers in that some threads had up to 8,900 responses. It would be inordinately time consuming to even attempt to read that many postings. If a chat room was established, it may be possible to limit the number of entrants in a room, thus enhancing the interaction and discussion and not allowing for too many discussions to be happening all at once.
For classroom purposes, I can see myself favoring a discussion forum over a live chat because of the opportunity for students to work through an issue and come to a conclusion, as opposed to a live chat where it may be difficult for students to stay on task. Further, a forum would allow students to interact with one another more in-depth and possibly more thoughtfully than in a live chat. It would also be potentially easier as a teacher to moderate a discussion forum than to monitor several live chat rooms. I will note here, however, that I enjoy the opportunity to interact with classmates during our weekly live chats because it is always thought-provoking to hear the thoughts of others and have a more conversational way of interacting than is provided through a discussion forum. In my own classroom, though, I would prefer the interactive, conversational discourse to be live and in-person rather than online.